East Oakland’s Alternative To Fixies: Meet the Scraper Bike Team

Grit Media, an Oakland based sports media start-up, spent the day with the Original Scraper Bike Team. Scraper Bikes — coined by Tyrone “Baybe Champ” Stevenson Jr. because of their resemblance to modified “scraper” cars with large chrome rims — began appearing on East Oakland’s streets in the early 2000s, when the Bay Area’s Hyphy movement had become a national phenomenon. Hidden inside a DIY bike shop on the corner of 50th and International Boulevard, Grit “mobs” with some of Oakland’s youth re-aligning bike forks, twisting handlebars, and raising seat posts barely high enough to reach. The result? A movement that is changing the bike game as we know it.